Bhai Ghulla Singh of Bhalur

Bhai Ghulla Singh of Bhalur, (d. 1924), one of the martyrs of Jaito, was born around 1896, the son of Bhai Narain Singh and Mai Kishan Kaur, a Jatt Sikh couple of the village of Bhalur, near Bagha Purana, in present-day Faridkot district of the Punjab. Tall and heavily built, Ghulla Singh helped his father and two elder brothers at tilling the family acre. He had received no formal education and was not yet married when the Akali agitation at Jaito protesting the forced abdication of the Sidhu Jat ruler of Nabha was gathering momentum. Ghulla Singh received the vows of the Khalsa at the hands of SantSundar Singh Bhindrariwale and became an Akali activist. On 20 February 1924, he went to watch the first of the columns of Sikh volunteers vowed to martyrdom {ShahidiJatha), camping at the village of Bargari, and accompanied it on its march to Jaito the following morning. Machinegun fire from an armed contingent of the Nabha State force, then under a British administrator, opened on the Akali volunteers near Gurdwara Tibbi Sahib. BhalGhulla Singh received a bullet shot in the head and fell down dead on the spot. His dead body was taken away by the state police and cremated along with other Jaito martyrs, around 21 in number.